Herzog Warns Ecosoc on Anti-zionism

Chaim Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, urged the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) today to reject the report of the Preparatory Subcommittee for the Conference on the program for the Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination. Addressing ECOSOC this afternoon, the Israeli envoy said that if the subcommittee’s recommendations are accepted, “the proposed conference (on racism) will undoubtedly become a conference against Zionism.”

He noted that the report of the subcommittee includes the General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, a report on the Baghdad Symposium on Zionism and other UN documents that have relevancy to Zionism. “The choice before this council is a conference genuinely devoted to combating racism or yet another conference under UN auspices which will become an instrument for the partisan aims of the Arab states in their unrelenting political warfare against the Jewish State and for the sinister forces of reactionary anti-Semitic racism,” he said.

He took issue with the Iraqi representative Bassam S. Kubbai who attacked Zionism in his address to ECOSOC last Friday and who called for the “full and universal implementation of UN decisions and resolutions on racism, racial discrimination…” Herzog said that the conference should discuss the “long and bitter struggle of the Kurdish people against Iraqi oppression.”

He cited numerous documents relative to Iraqi violations of human rights and oppression of its minorities. He said “the representative of this brutal, racist regime has the effrontery even to appear at an international conference discussing human rights, let alone to raise the issue of human rights in its deliberations.”